I remember sitting in
the garden of the Hotel Euro in Mostar, a place which was reserved, at the
time, for the Masters of the Universe - you knew this because of the armored
cars parked out front—listening to some American state department official
expounding on his role as a “peacekeeper” to the people sitting at his table
and anyone in the immediate vicinity who was unfortunate enough not to be able
to ignore him. The conversation began with a discussion of which political
groups the Americans were going to promote in the New Multi-Culti Bosnia, which
at the time looked pretty shabby because of the recent civil war. I remember
one high-rise apartment building not far from the NeredvaRiver, one of the most beautiful
rivers in the world, which seemed to be leaking sofa stuffing as the result of
taking one too many artillery hits. Our Master of the Universe was not going to
promote Group X because they had a bust of Ante Pavelic, former head of the
Ustashe, in their headquarters. I never got around to hearing just who he was
going to promote, probably because he didn’t know himself, but also because the
topic of conversation suddenly changed.

Suddenly the Master of the
Universe was talking about his grown daughter and his rocky relationship with
her—which, it seemed, was going from bad to worse. And why? Well, because she
never got over the fact that the Master of the Universe who was going to bring
peace to Bosnia and resolve centuries of ethnic conflict in the region had
divorced her mother, which is to say, his wife. The daughter was portrayed as
having some sort of psychological hang-up in this regard, as if an attachment
to her mother’s interests and the fact that her father had violated them were
something like a bad case of bulimia, which she had acquired while away at
college. The same man, in other words, who, we assume, could not control his
passions, the same man who could not keep his family together, the same man who
could not honor his marriage vows and who could not reason with his daughter,
was going to bring peace to the Balkans. Aristotle would have had a good laugh
over that one.

Tom Fleming, who spent time
on the other bank of the Neredva during the shelling of the already mentioned
apartment building, has turned what could have been just a bitter laugh into an
examination of how such an absurdity from the classical point of view has
become the norm for modernity. Like the Israeli military’s use of pornography,
the divorced Master of the Universe is a modern cultural phenomenon which
modernity cannot explain. This is primarily so because modernity doesn’t feel
that any explanation is necessary. In order to explain what is going on here,
Fleming takes us back to the classics—not, in this instance, back to Samson and
Delilah, the Hebrew classic that explains how lust makes you blind, but to
figures like Euripedes’ Hercules, the ruler who “realizes that, while he has
gone around the world killing monsters, he has not taken proper care of his
wife and children and father, who are his peculiar responsibility.” Particular
responsibility is the theme of Fleming’s book. In fact his thesis might be
summed up by saying that there is nothing but particular responsibility in this
life, and the only way to understand the moral order is by understanding that
fact.

The ancient Greek word for
jerk is “hero,” and, as Fleming tells us, “The hero’s dilemma is portrayed
starkly in the case of Agamemnon, Homer’s ‘lord of men,’ who could not launch
his divinely sanctioned expedition against Troy
until he had first sacrificed his daughter.” Euripedes could have been
describing the U.S. Department of State as its minions descended on Bosnia
to spread “democracy” as they define it, or the same sort of people spreading
feminism in conquered Iraq
and Afghanistan.
“To be truly heroic, it seems, one may have also to be a monster.”

In his history of morals,
Fleming cites novelists and playwrights more approvingly than philosophers,
because the novelists are experts at particular responsibility. They describe a
moral order that is rooted in the circumstances of everyday life and not in some
utopian idea, based more often than not on a misunderstanding of physics. The
idea morals are at root a kind of physics is not a new idea; nor is the idea
that a state can be based on that principle new. Fleming sees in the ancient
sophists, “the progenitors of the modern philosophers who legislate for the
world without settling their own affairs in order.” It takes a novelist like
Dickens, however, to come up with a character like Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, “whose eyes—so farsighted
that ‘they could see nothing nearer than Africa’—overlook
the needs of her own children, friends and neighbors.”

Fleming brings up a fact
which Nietzsche, a classics scholar in his own right, understood well. What the
Ancients called vice, the moderns call virtue. Those who reserve their “moral
energies for vast undertakings and foreign affairs and refuse to waste them on
spouses or friends or neighbors” have turned the moral order upside down,
because the moral order is based on particular obligations radiating out in widening
circles of decreasing obligation and emotional intensity, not vice versa. Man,
Fleming points out, following Aristotle “is a zoon politikon, a creature framed to live in society, and if he
thinks he can transcend the ordinary civilities of family, neighborhood and
nation, he may turn out to be that ‘tribeless, lawless, hearthless man’
denounced by Homer.”

Since we are dealing with
the most basic premises of human nature here, the order of charity did not change
with the coming of Christ. Grace perfects nature; it does not destroy it.
Nature remains the same, and the nature of moral obligation as a result always
proceeds outward with decreasing intensity and obligation through all of the
institutions of social life, which is to say oikos, ethnos, and polis - family,
Volk, and state. “Since one cannot
help everyone,” remarked Augustine in De
Doctrina Christiana, “one has to be concerned with those who by reason of
place, time or circumstances, are by some chance more tightly bound to you.”
Fleming traces the same classical line of thinking from Augustine to St. Thomas
Aquinas, who “makes it clear that charity is owed first to those who are
closest to God and second to those who are closest to us by nature. He goes so
far as to say that we are bound to love those connected to us more than we love
those who are better.”

“Universal benevolence,” in
other words, “was not the Greek ideal.” Loyalty to kith and kin was the ideal,
and when as in the case of Antigone, loyalty to a dead, unburied brother came
in conflict with the state, the moral choice meant loyalty to the more
immediate bond. In this she differed from the Soviet student who denounced his
parents and was murdered by his fellow villagers, an act which Fleming would
probably applaud, and beneficiaries of the DARE program who are encouraged to
inform the police about the drug habits of their parents.

The Catholic Church, which
refers to this idea as the principle of subsidiarity, is the only institution
left in the modern world which has preserved the idea of the primacy of
particular loyalty: “The most successful effort” in explaining the concept of
subsidiarity, according to which the higher should not do for the lower what
the lower can do for itself, “was the Catholic response put forward by Popes
Pius IX and Leo XIII, who defended a hierarchical social order that emphasized
the importance of rooted institutions such as the family, the community and the
nation.” This position, “summed up in the word subsidiarity,” reminds us that
our first obligation is to those closest to us.

What Fleming is proposing in
his book is the moral equivalent of a Copernican Counter-revolution. For those
unfamiliar with Polish culture, Mikolaj Kopernik brought about a shift in
mankind’s point of view when he showed that the earth revolved around the sun
and not, as the ancients thought, vice versa. Man, according to the Copernican
view, was no longer the center of the universe; he was an outside observer, a
passenger on an insignificant planet looking at the center from afar.
Copernicus’ revolution in astronomy was used to justify a revolution in morals,
one that has come to be known as the Enlightenment.

In his book on the morality
of everyday life, Fleming shows that in moral terms, the sun still revolves
around the earth. The moral agent is not a disinterested observer; he is the
center of the moral universe; and he can only make sense of that universe of
obligations if he looks at it as a series of concentric moral spheres—something
like Eudoxus’ theory of the celestial spheres. Instead of the earth surrounded
by the spheres of the moon, the sun, the planets and the stars, Fleming has the
moral agent surrounded by the spheres of family, ethnicity, and state, each exerting
moral pull on man in inverse proportion to their distance. There is no action
at a distance in Fleming’s moral universe. Either man makes the ether of his
immediate vicinity vibrate with love or he has no moral effect whatsoever.
Actually that is too optimistic an account of the actual state of affairs. The
man who does not fulfill his immediate moral obligations, family first, will
eventually create a moral system according to which vice will be portrayed as
virtue. That, in fact, is precisely what has happened over the course of the
past few centuries as European elites decided to emancipate the Christian idea
of the brotherhood of man from the theological context which gave it its
meaning the first place. The socialist international and the Sorosian new world
order are nothing more than secularized Christendom, and in the process of
secularization virtues got transmuted into vices.

Since the current day
Masters of the Universe believe in democracy, they believe that everyone can be
a hero, which is to say a jerk who abandons his wife and children while going
off to save the world. That sort of behavior used to be known as reprehensible;
it is now defined as virtue and Fleming describes just how that transformation
took place by giving us not only a history of classical morals but a history of
the “transvaluation of all values” as that has occurred since the
Enlightenment. What made this transvaluation of all values, to use Nietzsche’s
term, possible? The Enlightenment culminating in the French Revolution. Think
for a moment of the Hollywood film The Magnificent Seven, and you have some idea of how the
Enlightenment myth of the heroic, family-less individualist, “the demigod who
transcends the obligations of everyday life and vindicates the rights of oppressed
strangers” could still motivate people as late as the 1950s.

Cicero
“said that doing one’s particular duty is the difference between virtue and
vice.” Aristotle, whose views have already been cited and whose thought forms
the backbone of Fleming’s argument, “warned his fellow Greeks against the
perils of a large commonwealth in which aliens can usurp the privileges of
citizens.” But all that changed when “Philosophers,” which is to say sophists,
like Voltaire decided to apply Newtonian physics to the social order. The
result was a world in which atoms were proclaimed the primary reality, and
family obligations reduced to the level of the chimera.

The Marquis de Sade, who
read de la Mettrie’s Man a Machine
while incarcerated in the Bastille, is the best example of the Enlightenment
“philosopher,” even though Fleming confers that dubious distinction on
Voltaire. (Fleming describes Voltaire’s “Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon” as
“the symbolic kick-off of international humanitarianism.”) The “divine” Marquis
asks the “shavepate rabble” what “is to become of your laws, your ethics, your
religion , your gallows, your Gods and your Heavens and your Hell when it shall
be proven” that everything man holds as sacred and true and good is nothing
more than an epiphenomenon based on “a flow of liquids.”

The result of the
Enlightenment’s appropriation of Copernicus is “alien” morality. The only way
that a man can be truly moral is by placing himself as a disinterested observer
off in space somewhere. William Godwin, England’s
universally detested promoter of the French Revolution and the father of poet
Percy Shelley, formulated the argument for the English speaking world. “The
soundest criterion of virtue,” he tells us, “is to put ourselves in the place
of an impartial spectator, of an angelic nature, suppose, beholding us from an
elevated station, and uninfluenced by our prejudices, conceiving what would be
his estimate of the intrinsic circumstances of our neighbor, and acting
accordingly.” In other words, the truly moral person would look upon his sick
child as one of many sick children and act accordingly. Even Godwin couldn’t
act according to his own principle. When Shelley applied Godwin’s teaching
about marriage as “the most odious of all monopolies” to Godwin’s daughter,
Godwin balked at the prospect. It was only the prospect of getting a portion of
Shelley’s family fortune which calmed his natural aversion to the
implementation of his own ideas on actual family members. Fleming cleverly
traces Godwin’s “impartial spectator . . . beholding us from a elevated
station” back to the devil’s second temptation of Christ, the one in which he
takes him to the top of the temple and “shows him all the kingdoms of the world
and the glory of them.” The devil knew that people in “high places” are
uniquely situated because of their position to commit abominable crimes, things
like mass murder. “The pilots, navigators, bombardiers and gunners” who engage
in high altitude bombing, Dave Grossman tells us in Fleming’s book, “were able
to bring themselves to kill these civilians primarily through application of
the mental leverage provided to them by the distance factor” because “from a
distance I can deny your humanity.”

High altitude ethics has led
to inhuman societies no matter what the intention of those who propose those
theories. Fleming is no admirer of Tom Paine, whom he describes as a rootless
cosmopolitan, but he is an admirer of Thomas Jefferson. But this is the same
Jefferson who set out to rewrite the Bible to take into account what Jesus
really would have said, had he the benefits of Jefferson’s
enlightenment:

As [Jefferson] explained in a
letter to John Adams, Jesus’ purpose had been the reformation of the “wretched
depravity” of peculiar duties, and it was Jefferson’s
intention, “in extracting the pure principles which he taught,” to “strip off
the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have
travestied them in various forms.” In one way or another, the moral doctrines
of Voltaire, Kant and the New England transcendentalists
all derive directly or indirectly from the sort of bowdlerization that Jefferson
undertook. It was during the same period - the 18th century - that Stoic
conceptions of universal brotherhood, international law and world government
reemerged.

Fleming’s real hero is
Samuel Johnson, because Johnson eschewed messianic politics as much as he
cultivated particular obligations. Johnson was “kind to the poor, faithful to
his wife, loyal to his king and country, [and] constant in the exercise of his
religion.” He “saw his duty neither as a bloodless universal law nor as a
bloody call to arms to lift mankind above the merely human.” As such, Johnson
was “the ideal antidote to the poison of sentimental universalism” that has led
to the international casino capitalism of George Soros on the one hand and the
equally repugnant international socialism which “stigmatize[s] every
manifestation of patriotism, ethnic pride and local attachment as racist” on
the other.

If the enemy on the personal
level is the “hero,” the disconnected individual, who, like Agamemnon is ready
to sacrifice his daughter for the success of a business trip, the enemy on the
political level is nationalism, which Fleming claims “is a false and destructive
theory that leads a people to sacrifice what is real and vital in favor of an
illusory future.” Like George Orwell, Fleming distinguishes between nationalism
and patriotism, which Orwell defined as “devotion to a particular place and a
particular way of the life, which one believes to be the best in the world but
has no wish to force on other people.” Nationalism, of course, believes the
exact opposite. The nationalist believes that one particular perspective is to
be forced on everyone.

In his Nicomachian Ethics, Aristotle often refers to the virtue which has
no name. The opposite of nationalism is a virtue which has no name in English,
but it does have a name in Serbian. The “instinctive attachment to family and
tribe” is known as “rodoljublje” in
Serbian. It literally means “love of the stock” or “rod” or “love of kith and kin.” There are political entities which
allow this sort of love and there are those which do not. In the 21st century
the former are the exception and the latter the rule. In the history of nations
we have two extremes constantly subverting the possibilities of international
peace and cooperation. On the one hand, we have the primitive tribe which calls
itself the “human race” and denies humanity to all other ethnic groups. Nationalism
is simply a modern refinement of that idea. On the other hand, we have the
followers of Zeno the Stoic, who consider themselves “citizens of the world,”
and end up being rootless destroyers of culture.

The virtue which resides between
both extremes was known - politically, at least - as Christendom. Catholic
Europe was the successor of Rome,
which united ethnic diversity under the umbrella of one faith. The history of
Enlightenment universalism is the attempt to reinvent this wheel, without God
or his moral law. The Holy Roman Empire was the
embodiment of Christendom and, as Fleming tells us, Lord Acton “was an admirer
of the Holy Roman Empire” because “the mixture of
competing nations under one crown served to prevent the tyranny of the
centralized state.” Acton felt that
“a federal system, such as that of Switzerland
or of the early American republic,” was “the best solution to ethnic conflict.”
The tragedy of history can be embodied in the fact that the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, the successor of the Holy Roman Empire, failed
to honor subsidiarity and its Catholic roots when it started promoting
nationalism- both German and Hungarian - instead of ethnic pluralism and
subsidiarity. Once it began to “force assimilation,” much as the United
States would do at a later date, “Austria-Hungary
. . . degenerated from the more inclusive ideal of the Holy roman
Empire into a dual monarchy, which at the mercy of dual nationalism
(Hungarian and German) made it difficult if not impossible for Slovaks, Croats
and Serbs to preserve their identities.” Nationalism trumped “rodoljublje,” and America’s
President Wilson finished off the job by mutilating the Austro-Hungarian Empire
with all of its cultural and diplomatic sophistication and contributing, as a
result, to the rise of Masonic Prussian hegemony over central Europe
and, ultimately, Hitler.

Like charity, nationalism
begins at home, either as a civil war or social engineering, or, in the case of
America, the
former followed by the latter. In this process, one group, usually an ethnic
group which has adopted a messianic nationalist ideology, gets to force its
ideology on the entire nation in the name of “Italy,” “Germany,” in the case of
the Prussians after the first unification, and “America,” which was a construct
forced on the entire nation when the North defeated the South in the Civil War.
That means that Lombardy or Florence
ceases to have the ability to promote its own culture; it must adopt the
culture of “Italy,”
which is to say in the case of the Risorgiamento,
Masonic anticlericalism. The same could be said of the Lower Rhine
and Bavaria in Germany,
which after 1870 had to adopt Prussian enlightened Protestantism in order to
remain “German.”

If that particular
nationalist group is especially successful, it can then impose its nationalism
on other cultures outside its linguistic and cultural sphere. So Risorgiamento led ultimately to Italy’s
invasion of Ethiopia,
a culture that at first glance doesn’t seem particularly Italian. Bismarck’s
unification of Germany
and imposition of Prussian nationalism led inexorably, according to the logic
of empire, to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia
and Poland.

In America
the metastasis of nationalism and subsequent centralization of power began in
earnest with the Civil War and proceeded with exponential leaps with every war
thereafter, until the present time when the Bush Administration, under the
tutelage of Trotskyite neoconservatives has reached a state of perpetual war in
the service of American nationalism and imperialism. For a perspective
diametrically opposed to Fleming’s expressed in a book which appeared at about
the same time his did, one could hardly find a better example than David Frum’s
and Richard Perle’s to me An End to Evil.
The title itself exudes the messianic politics one has become so common in the
wake of the neoconservative take-over of American foreign policy. “The United
States,” these authors tell us,

has been
reproached even by many who should know better for inserting itself into Iraq
rather than letting the Iraqis rule themselves. But it is only because we did
insert ourselves into Iraq that the Iraqis have any hope of ruling themselves -
and the same will be true in Iran and everywhere else in the Islamic world where we must fight.

Must fight? According to
which necessity?It is probably
sentiments like this which prompted Fleming to conclude somberly that
“Rational, universal, objective ethics, culminating in the doctrine of
international rights, represents a more profound threat to the human future
even that the environmental havoc . . . that is also the residue of Western
liberalism.

But perhaps not, because
there is nothing really rational about the plan that Perle and Frum are
proposing. In the ascendancy of the Neoconservatives, we have a return to a
period before the Enlightenment. We have in Frum and Perle the return of the
messianic politics of the 17th century Puritans and the Jewish revolutionaries
who inspired them.

Fleming concludes his attack
on “universal objective ethics” by claiming that we must now choose “among
three scenarios, Christian charity, ruthless liberal individualism, and Marxian
egalitarianism.” Conservatives, he tells us, are really just a different kind
of liberal and “as liberals,” they will be forced to chose some form of Marxism
volens nolens. But a book like An End to Evil belies Fleming’s
conclusion. As anyone who was unfortunate enough to have been near a television
during Ronald Reagan’s funeral knows, liberalism and conservatism, the last two
options Fleming proposes, have merged in truly Hegelian fashion and have
reemerged as something much more theological than the Enlightenment would have
allowed. They have merged into something like emperor worship in the service of
Messianic politics.After World War II,
people like Russell Kirk tried to resurrect Edmund Burke, the man who attacked
the French Revolution and praised the “little platoons” that command out
loyalties as an alternative. Fleming rightly sees “Burkean traditionalism” as
“a mechanism by which liberalism was able to self-correct before plunging into
the abysses of hedonist individualism and Marxist collectivism. It could not,
however, by itself serve as the basis of an illiberal political philosophy or
movement.”

Unfortunately, conservatism
didn’t self-correct anything ultimately. It went to its grave like Ronald
Reagan ten years after it had descended into senile dementia. It was replaced, as
the eulogies at Ronald Reagan’s funeral made perfectly clear, by something more
primitive, by the messianic politics of the 17th century. “Jewish aspirations
for national independence,” Fleming writes,

were not sanctioned by Jesus, and they erupted into
revolutionary violence, first under Nero - when they were decisively squelched
by Roman General and soon-to-be emperor Vespasian and his son Titus . . . and
later under Hadrian. Christians viewed the Jewish disaster to some extent as a
judgment on the Jews’ repudiation of Christ. In reacting against Jewish
nationalism, Christians put strong emphasis on the universal brotherhood of
man.

It would seem then that the
three scenarios which Fleming proposes have been superseded. Christian charity
remains an option, but “ruthless liberal individualism, and Marxian
egalitarianism” have merged into ruthless liberal egalitarianism of the sort
trumpeted by George Soros, Frum, Perle and Reagan’s eulogists. We are
confronted with overtly theological alternatives. The Enlightenment is over. So
is conservatism. It is place we have Nimrod, the builder of global empires and
whatever lessons can be drawn from the story of the Tower
of Babel, where man decided everyone
was going to speak one language in one globalist empire and, as a result,
incurred the wrath of God. The Tower
of Babel allowed the Jews to look down on the world from a height
appropriate to a god or an angel or the navigator on a saturation bombing raid,
the sort of observer proposed by William Godwin as the ideal moral agent.
Fleming is proposing the exact opposite alternative in his book. He is
proposing a morality that is rooted - an ethnic ethics, so to speak, with its
feet in the dirt. Instead of telling his readers how to bring about “An End to
Evil,” Fleming is telling them that “Evil is a part of earthly experience, and
it is not only unreasonable but unhealthy to think that it might be
eradicated.” As of now, with the Enlightenment and conservatism gone, his
ethnic ethics is the only alternative to the Messianic Politics of the Jews and
the Judaizers. “High places,” he tells us, “were always a temptation of the
children of Israel.”

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